The Pirate King Ch. 19

Hello, all. First things first, this is part of an ongoing series. I recommend going back and reading the previous chapters before jumping in here. Don't worry, we'll still be here when you get back :)

Alternate title - "that's the death shit taken care of"

Hope your holiday seasons are treating you with gentleness and compassion. Stay safe and remember your power - you have a right to be happy. Find that happiness and hold onto it. In a world that tells us our joy should come in very specific ways, we are all varied and beautiful individuals who deserve our own distinct paths. Don't let people tell you that your path doesn't exist just because they don't want to see it.

Peace, love, happiness. Joy and a family that loves you and is willing to take care of you at your worst as well as your best.

*****

The days passed.

They did not pass slowly or quickly, they simply stretched out, endless and eternal, the beginning of one blending into the end of another, no start and no finish in the endless turning of the sun. It would have been tolerable if we had been on our way somewhere, if we had a destination. If we had set our bow North and held our revenge tight in the palm of our hands until it drew blood.

We did not sail north.

We did not sail anywhere, not truly. We merely moved through the seas in a meandering path, catching what currents would carry us and whatever winds filled our sails. We took no ships, docked at no ports, had no clear objective and yet still we sailed.

The men seemed content with this. Their days were the same no matter our destination, tasks the same, duties constant. Their nights were filled with training, led now by the Russian at the request of Thron. I came to watch, worried that he might take this as seriously as he took anything else, but he seemed manageable. The men at least did not seem frightened of him as he lifted them above his head and threw them across the deck, choosing to come back for instruction rather than run for cover. In fact, they seemed satisfied enough by his tutelage that I heard not a single man complain about our current movements,

Cookie, too, held no anger at our current course. "Near no work for me," he told me happily. "Only protections we need here are the ones we need near everywhere. And," he added, a knife suddenly pointed in my direction, "the ones we took on when you came aboard."

I shrugged. I was not concerned for the men on my behalf. They would find a way to be safe or they would not.

I was, however, concerned about the Captain.

Of all the people on the ship, he had the most control over our actions. In truth he had complete control; any other Captain would have had to rely on the winds and the ocean waves to comply, but I was the winds and the ocean waves and so much more besides and all he had to do was ask and a path would be made for him. He could go anywhere. He could do anything.

He did not. At night he sat up, staring at his maps, one hand on his sextant and the other on a compass that was so battered I trusted it innately. When the oil ran so low in his lamp the light was flickering, when he could no longer see for the darkness that surrounded him he would sigh, leaning back in his chair. He would sit like that for some time. Silent. Alone. And then he would come to bed.

I wish, how I wish that him coming to bed meant coming to me, that he would return to my arms and my warmth and find comfort in my presence. A week ago, it would have. Before he had found out about my past, certainly. But now?

Since that night in the riggings he did not touch me after dark. He would come to bed so late he must have thought me already asleep and lay his body down a perfect distance away from mine. I was not asleep; I could not sleep without him, not anymore. It was foolish of me to even try. And so I would lay awake and listen to him rustle maps and scratch notes, the sea outside rushing against our tiny home, the wind brushing the tops of reaching waves. I would listen to the Captain sit alone, so alone, and I would will him to hear the stars sing.

If he heard, he did not show it. He would come to bed, settling in so that the bed creaked and we did not touch and I would hear him sigh, would wait until his breathing settled, and then, only then could I try to find sleep for myself.

He was not a morning person, my Captain. He had not been a morning person so long as I had known him. Yet every morning in that week I woke to find myself alone in an empty bed.

The distance was dizzying. It was painful. We would interact in the day as if there had been no change, he would laugh and smile and flirt, his hand would dance across my forearm or my shoulder and the world would stop but it couldn't stop, not truly, and night would fall and he would close himself to me as if I had never held him, as if we had not found each other on the endless sea. As if he did not love me.

I begged the stars to sing louder and settled exhaustion in my bones.

We sailed like that for days. In the day, all was well. I fought with the men when I needed release and listened to the way my Captain could laugh at other's jokes. At night I pretended to sleep while he laid too far from me, and in the morning I woke alone to begin it all again.

Natch offered no advice. "He's working through some things," was all he would say. "Be patient with him." And I was patient but I was also worried, and he did not sleep nearly enough and he did not touch me and I could only wonder at the reasons why.

One night I could no longer take it. When he came to bed I turned to him, opening my eyes. He froze, body half in and half out of bed.

Something began to hurt deep within my stomach. "My love," I murmured.

He did not look at me.

I sat up, the bed moving beneath my form. I had taken to sleeping in clothes, hoping that this would make the Captain more comfortable with me, noticing that he no longer undressed before coming to bed and dreaming, wishing the solution was so simple, and so my shirt rustled as I made my motion. The Captain did not move in reaction; he was a statue, a dent in the bed that I wanted to smooth out.

"My love," I called to him.

He did not respond.

"Love." This was more insistent. Still, nothing. Then, quietly, so quietly I could allow myself to believe I had not said it at all, "What have I done wrong?"

The Captain did not turn. His body did not respond. I waited long, so long I thought I would burst, and then I took my wishes and love and expectations and wrapped them up tight within my chest, laid back down, and tried to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, the Captain was already gone.

****

The Captain had fallen into a routine with breakfast. He would brush in, grab his food, brush a kiss over my cheek, and brush back out. This was one of the few times I got to touch him in those days and it was something I clung to like flotsam.

That morning, the Captain forsake this routine and left me to drown.

There were a thousand reasons why this might have happened. Natch was also missing, as was Ichor and Finn and Hamms, any of which might have had a meeting with the Captain or might have met up with him and delayed him or all of which might have been isolated incidents. I ladled oatmeal and tried very hard not to read into his absence.

Thron smiled up at me when I sat down across from him, Gret sliding over to make room for my musculature. Beside him, the Russian was halfway through a tale that I did not think to pay attention to until I realized that it involved me.

When he finished, he looked at me expectantly. "That," I told his grinning form, "is not how that happened."

The large man merely shrugged. "Does it matter?"

Of course it did not. What was the truth in the face of a story? I turned back to my breakfast and wished I had never spoken up at all.

"The men need more practice with arms," Gret was telling the Russian. At some point in the past weeks the two had become fast friends. I hoped Gret was prepared to fall out of friendship as quickly as he had fallen into it; there was no stable footing around a man such as the Russian. "We've been doing strength for too long."

"Da, and strength is good!" The Russian spread his hands wide, nearly hitting the man to his left. "A strong man is a good swordsman!"

Thron took the hand the Russian had placed in his face, drawing to down to their sides. I watched how this drew the Russian down, too, how the slightest touch from Thron made this man's wild energy somehow seem more tamable, on the boundary of something you could hold.

Something Thron could hold. He held it then between their palms, in his smile, in the way the Russian's eyes softened than sharpened then softened again.

"But they also need to learn how to use their swords," he said and it was such a gentle reminder, a ribbing that could have been taken from the body of the Russian it was so familiar and the Russian smiled back with such an air of comfort and joy that it hurt.

Without another word, I stood up and walked away.

***

I knew the Captain would not be in his chambers; he avoided them during the day. And he was not in the mess, and the deck was abandoned but for the men who were cleaning and coiling and mending, and the meeting room was empty but for a stack of papers held down by an empty cup, and Ichor said that no one had been down in the storage chambers but he and Sneg.

I was lost, I was alone. I needed my Captain and he was nowhere to be found.

And so I turned to his first mate.

I didn't have to ask anything of Natch before he began nodding. He glanced up at the mainsail, his hands busy on a particularly stuck knot. "Been up there all day. Won't come down for anything, and won't say a word." He turned his eyes to me. "You guys alright?"

I nodded my thanks and turned to the sky.

The Captain was sitting on a crossbeam, one leg dangling on either side of space. He heard me arriving and sighed, head pressing back against the main mast.

I rested my arms on the beam a few feet from his form. "Hey."

He patted the wood between his legs, inviting me into his space. My brain hesitated, cautious not only for my own sake but also for him, but my body moved before I could think to stop it. I settled into his arms, my back against his chest. He put his arms around my waist and I heard him sigh.

We sat there in silence, far above the decks. The sun was behind the sail and so we were in semi-shade, a translucent shelter that felt intimate. Personal. I sat and felt the Captain breathe behind me and knew there was nowhere else I would rather be.

He was planning on speaking before he did. I knew it from the way his breathing picked up, his heart beat. His fingers picking at the fabric of my shirt. I waited to see what would come from the oxygen he was so studiously pulling from the air and into his body.

"I'm sorry," was what he had to say. I turned my head slightly against him so that I could look up at his face. "I always end up being so unkind to you."

I wanted to tell him no, that this was no the truth, but the storms of the last week did not allow the words to form in my lungs.

"I'm sorry," he repeated.

"You needed space."

His arms tightened around me. "I needed you." His head dipped to the top of mine, lips resting lightly on my forehead. "I need you, and I keep pushing you away."

My hand came up to cover his lightly, fingers brushing against the back of his worn skin. "My love..."

"Nights are so hard," he told me. I felt his heart, felt its rapid pace. "Nights are so fucking hard. I can do it in the daytime, I can pretend everything's okay. But."

My fingers continued to slip over his skin, feeling scars and blemishes span out under my touch.

"I can't stop thinking about him, Sailor. Can't get him out of my head. He used to tell me that if I ever touched anyone else, he would find them and." I felt him shudder behind me. "Fuck. He said the most fucked up shit, Sailor. He'd say the most horrible, fucked up shit and he'd tell me, he'd say, 'You'll do it too. I'll make you do it too.' And he'd laugh." I felt the Captain shiver behind me and pressed into his body. I was here, he was safe. He would always be safe with me. "And I know he can't, I mean, I know he isn't here and we're not even in the North yet but shit, love. Shit." He drew in a shaky breath. I tried to smooth out the skin beneath my fingers. "I keep having these nightmares, you know? Nightmares with him in them, with Val, with crew members I used to know. Crew members I know still." He paused; I felt his breath pause. "With you."

My fingers froze.

He continued, his voice rushed. "And I know they're not real, I know you'd never do those things but fuck they feel so, so. And gods, Sailor, it's so hard to know what to think anymore or how to feel, there are stories that I used to define who he was, that I believed told me things about him but now I just, I don't know because what if that wasn't him? What if that was someone else?" Another one of those shaking breaths rocked against my back. "What if it was you?"

I turned my head into his chest. "I am not the King."

"I know, I know." And I believe that he did. I believe that he understood exactly what I meant when I said those words, how hard I tried to move away from the stories others had placed on my back. "But how am I supposed to look at you now and not see shadows of the crown?"

We sat there in the silence that came after a large truth, the calm after a wave you didn't see coming. I felt knocked down. I felt shaken.

I felt guilt, because I had caused - was causing him - pain, and I did not know how to make it stop.

"I'm sorry," I told the Captain. The weight of my past life threatened to push me from the sky, send me crashing back down to the decks. "I am so sorry."

But the Captain, the Captain. Always binding me in ways I did not know I needed. His arms held me tight, then tighter still, anchoring me to our home far from the mundanity of the earth. Small noises of comfort dropped from his mouth to land in my hair, dripped into my eyes, my mouth. I opened my lips and breathed them in, hoping they could find a permanent home in my body.

"Love," he was saying to me, "my love, I don't blame you, please don't think I blame you for any of this."

How could I not? I breathed him in and tried to feel the shape of truth.

"I'm the one who should be apologizing for how I've been acting."

He should apologize for nothing. He was the endless sky to the horizon I created; I had not been complete until he had stepped into my life. I felt him settle against me and knew there was only one truth that mattered. "I love you."

"I love you too." This time his breath felt much more stable. "It's going to be alright. We'll get through this."

I made myself ask the question I truly wanted answered. How did this man make me feel so meek? "Does this mean you'll come back to bed?"

He paused for a moment. "I don't know."

I nodded, but he understood that this was not the answer I had wanted to hear. "The nights are hard. The nights are so hard, and I just don't know. I don't..."

He sighed, his mouth burying in the top of my head. I could feel his breath. He might have said more words to me after that but they were lost in quiet and the brush of my hair. We stayed that way for hours, just us and the moving sun until the sun began to take its leave and the men came out on deck to practice arms.

I slipped down the ropes to join them, leaving the Captain, radiant, in the setting sun.

***

When I came to the room that night the Captain was already at his maps.

He had slipped down from the riggings and past the men without a word when true dark had fallen. A few of the men noticed, calling out for him to join in the sparring, but a quick laugh and a wave of his hand was all they received before he was gone below the decks.

At the sound of the door closing behind me, he glanced up. "Sailor." Brightness slid over his face, a flicker that contrasted and enhanced the dark in his eyes. "Will you come look at this?"

I had never seen the maps the Captain had laid out, or almost any of the maps he used. I held the currents they tried to pin down in two dimensions roaring in my soul and whispering at my fingertips. What use were maps to me?

Still, these papers the Captain presented now impressed me. I raised my brow as I took in the handwritten notes, the annotations in various inks. The physical representation of an intangible thing. "You've mapped the border."

"As best I could." He was staring intently down at the sketched lines that demarcated the North from the South. "I don't quite understand it, but I know where Dreyfus wouldn't sail and I knew..." He trailed off, eyes tracing the marks that he must have used to keep him safe for years. "He gave me more information than he thought he did."

"It's mostly right," I confirmed. His eyes came up to me quick, but he did not seem surprised that I would know such a thing.

"Where am I wrong?"

Where was he wrong? I ran over the map again, searching for any egregious errors. "Here," I pointed to a small atoll. "It runs on the other side of this, although that is something that warmer currents bring about seasonally. And here, this island no longer exists at all. And here..." My finger paused on the map, feeling the smoothness of the material. "It is not a thing that holds well to paper, the border."

The Captain sighed. "I had a feeling." Then those dark eyes were back on me. Staring. Waiting. "But you know where it is, yes?"

This felt like a test, somehow. What would be the right answer? I desperately wanted to be correct, but all I had for the Captain was the truth. "Yes."

"Good." He pointed at the map. "Is this still in the South?"

It was only by leaning around his arm that was able to see to which island he was pointing. It was then another moment of orienting myself against the map, landmarks I understood and could place in my body, but when I finally understood what he was asking of me.

This, this was why I had no use of maps. If he has pointed to the island in the sea, or if he had pointed the ship toward that bit of land, placed us in the currents to take us there, I would have recognized it immediately. How could I not? It was as much a part of my legacy as the crown.

"That island," I told the Captain, my eyes frozen on the small point all but hidden by his index finger. How could a piece of paper reduce something so dangerous to a vision so trivial? This was how captains ran their ships aground on shoals when they should know better, trusting the safety of paper and ink. "That island is a trap."

"Of course it is," the Captain responded immediately. His relaxed attitude calmed me, but not by much. "It got its reputation somehow." His eyes flicked over the map, intense beneath knitted brows. "They say it holds the key to killing the King, immeasurable power, and still no one goes there. There's got to be a reason. Now, they all say it's haunted - "

"It isn't haunted," I told him with certainty. Or if it was, the ghosts were less of a threat than whatever killed the vessels they used to inhabit. "And there is no power to be found there."

"Well." The Captain turned so that his back was against the table. His eyes were on me now. My body relaxed to find itself in the power of his gaze. "What is there?"

"Rum."

"Rum?"

"It's a rum port." And old one. Perhaps one of the oldest. "But it's a trap."

"Well," the Captain repeated. "Rum isn't all that bad, is it?"

I stared at him.

"And a trap is better than haunted, I suppose. What kind of trap?"

A hereditary one. My father had used that island, and his father before him. "One that kills those foolish enough to step inside."